“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
When we forsake God, we create an infinite void in our lives whether we know it or not. For God is the only thing, the only being who is truly infinite— “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” This is to say nothing of “God is love.” Taken together, to forsake God is to leave an infinite void of love.
Money, wealth, possessions—mammon—tend to become our de facto master in the absence of God. Once we have abandoned the infinite, the finite is all that’s left. But even if we should obtain everything of which the finite consists, it is still infinitely less than the infinite. And so a desire for more, which often metastasizes into greed, inevitably preoccupies or consumes us.
It is easy to think that only other people have erred in this way, especially the wealthy and well-off, but have we not all forsaken God? Do we not all reach beyond (and yet far short) of Him? Do not our lives reveal the unsightly evidence?
The astounding news is that though we abandon the infinite God, He has not abandon us to the infinite void. He who created all of space—light-years upon light-years of cosmos—sought and confined Himself to the most finite space of all. He let His own creation nail Him to a ~ten by ~seven foot cross. And as they did it, He pleaded, “Father, forgive them…”
This cross is the farthest distance from God’s original position; the very place where we rejected Him as master, where He instead became our servant; the place we fell to when we reached “beyond” Him, where He now reaches out His hand to us.
Jesus, God of infinite grace, how can I turn away that hand, that pierced hand?
Latitudes of Plenty 